'Five-Dimensional' Storage Promises 10-TB Discs

A team of Australian researchers have developed a "five-dimensional" storage medium that promises to store up 10 terabytes on to a single disc. The problem, however, is the storage material.

A team of Australian researchers have developed a "five-dimensional" storage medium that promises to store up 10 terabytes on to a single disc.

The team has signed a deal with Samsung to develop the technology, Reuters reported. The trio published their paper in the current edition of Nature.

Peter Zijlstra, James W.M. Chon and Min Gu of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia found a way to combine addressing data using wavelength, polarization and three spatial dimensions, creating the so-called five dimensions of addressable space. The approach allows for a storage density of a terabit of information in just a cubic centimeter of space.

Mixing and matching different methods of addressing data has been tried using individual methods, the researchers said; writing data to a three-dimensional storage medium has been one of the hallmarks of holographic storage.

It's difficult to say, however, how easily a solution like this might be moved into production; the medium used to store the information was a network of gold nanorods.

"The major hurdle is the lack of a suitable recording medium that is extremely selective in the domains of wavelength and polarization and in the three spatial domains, so as to provide orthogonality in all five dimensions," the researchers wrote in an abstract. "Here we show true five-dimensional optical recording by exploiting the unique properties of the longitudinal surface plasmon resonance (SPR) of gold nanorods."

Data was read using a technique the researchers called "longitudinal SPR-mediated two-photon luminescence."

The team was able to project or write information using different color wavelengths into the material. Additional information was then added by polarizing the light, first at a fixed orientation and then by rotating the filter 90 degrees.